Political Science
I recently finished two books on the same topic written a century apart. The first was written at the end of the 19th century by Russian aristocrat turned revolutionary Peter Kropotkin, entitled Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902). The second written last year by English psychologist, Nichola Raihani, The Social Instinct: How Cooperation Shaped the World (2021). They're interesting books on the topic of evolution and its social constructs, but maybe more interesting as examples on how science is done. For all the blather about “believing science” in the last years, much science is and will always be subjective. What we look for in many ways shapes what we find.
From the beginning, Darwin's theory was grandly misinterpreted, most egregiously for political agendas supporting established power structures. The two greatest abuses occurred with the terms “survival of the fittest” and “struggle for existence.” As for the latter, Darwin states quite specifically, “I should premise that I use the Struggle for Existence in a large and metaphorical sense.” Nonetheless, it's been constantly misused metaphorically and literally for the last century and half.
“Survival of the fittest,” a term Darwin later borrowed from Herbert Spencer, is likewise continually misused. Simplistically and wrongly, it is endlessly defined as the “strongest.” This is not the case at all. Both terms are continually misunderstood because the true radical nature of Darwin's theory remains little understood or accepted, even amongst biologists.
Darwin's true insight was that of “natural selection,” best understood as the entirety of nature ceaselessly interacting to create life's glorious complexity. No one aspect, no species can truly be understood without understanding all the numerous forces acting upon it. The struggle for existence is not simply one individual pitted against another, one group against another, or even one species against another. It is life's endless interactions, including every complexity and manifestation, creating magnificent symphonic ecological systems composed of grand innumerable diversity.
Understanding this, “survival of the fittest” takes on a much richer and sophisticated meaning. Fit, instead of a simplistic definition as strong, is better understood as a riotously shaped element fitting into a perpetually fluid, constantly reshaping system comprised of almost infinite parts, all of which together define or “select” any single element. Understanding this evolutionary totality, makes Darwin's insights far more radical and eminently more beautiful than what is generally accepted.
In being understood, one of natural selections greatest problems was it came two-centuries into the dominance of Newtonian physics and Cartesian logic. Both were differential, that is dividing into parts provides understanding. They were also reductionist and determinist, that is by reducing to the smallest elements and understanding their motion, an object's future could be determined. These ways of looking at things provided plenty of knowledge and in many ways were extraordinarily powerful, building the scientific foundation for industrial technologies, but as an exclusive way of looking at biological systems, they prove both insufficient and problematic.
In many ways, Darwin's biological insights preceded by a half-century the grand radicality of quantum physics, which overturned the objective understanding of reductionism and determinism. In 1955, physicist and atomic bomb creator J. Robert Oppenheimer put the consequences to the understanding of quantum physics this way,
“The logical consequences of this is the idea of totality or wholeness. Newtonian physics, classical science was differential, anything that went on you could break up into fine points and look at it. If you look at an atomic phenomenon between the beginning and the end, the end won't be there, it will be a different phenomenon. Every pair of observations you predict, that is a global thing and cannot be broken down.”
Parts comprise a whole. You need understanding of both to understand either. This is especially true in understanding organic life, yet, evolutionary thinking is constantly reduced to smallest parts without conceiving the environmental whole. Component parts whether groups, individuals, and god help us genes, are all sought to be understood outside the whole systems which every step of the way select their development. Darwin's natural selection explains the origin of whole species, not a reduced origin of the individual or genes.
By the end of the 19th century, misunderstandings of Darwin's theory, particularly survival of the fittest and struggle for existence, were promoted as an individual's actions defining the course of evolution, a turning of Darwin's insights on their head. This was done quite purposely, allowing a political thought to defend established power structures. “Social Darwinism” became the most popular misinterpretation, vast vestiges of which still pollute evolutionary thought and politics.
Into this environment, Peter Kropotkin published his book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution. Kropotkin is best known as one of history's great anarchists. A century ago, anarchy was a more or less organized and not very effective political force. In some ways, anarchy was maybe the most confused politics of an extremely confused political era. Mostly, it was Europeans trying to figure out a decentralized politics for which they had no experience, simultaneously ignoring any lessons from the greatest practically decentralized politics of the era, the American republic.
Kropotkin was one of the distinctive breeds of the era, mid-century born Russian aristocrat turned revolutionary. In early life, he was educated in geography, zoology, botany and other sciences. He undertook a couple expeditions to the wilds of Siberia and Manchuria, studying the geography, animals, and plants. In his early 30's, he was imprisoned for his political activities, escaped, gaining four decades of exile in England.
His experience in the wild areas of eastern Russia, observing the great variety and masses of animal species, led him to a richer understanding of the complexities of Darwin's theory. Kropotkin writes in his Mutual Aid, Darwin “Foresaw that the term which he was introducing into science would lose its philosophical and its only true meaning if it were to be used in its narrow sense only -- that of a struggle between separate individuals for the sheer means of existence.”
Kropotkin specifically calls out the Social Darwinist and their misuse of Darwin. In opposition, he points to Russian zoologist Professor Karl Kessler of the University of Saint Petersburg who wrote, "I obviously do not deny the struggle for existence, but I maintain that the progressive development of the animal kingdom, and especially of mankind, is favored much more by mutual support than by mutual struggle.”
Now progressive is a loaded word. It is extremely important to point out the great difficulty in talking about “social” organization in nature. Our entire vocabulary on any such matters, while not meaningless, are fraught with misinterpretation. All our words and definitions, particularly those dealing with social relations or culture, have less clear meaning outside our species, not to mention obscurities within. We must tread warily with implied meanings of human cultural definitions ascribed to other species. In some ways, they can be quite useful, but they are at best soft, and can be loaded with a seeming significance that simply does not exist.
Kropotkin adds, “The readiness of the Russian zoologists to accept Kessler's views seems quite natural, because nearly all of them have had opportunities of studying the animal world in the wide uninhabited regions of Northern Asia and East Russia; and it is impossible to study like regions without being brought to the same ideas.”
Kropotkin spends two chapters describing and interpreting behaviors of the animals he's observed on his expeditions. This includes various species of bees, ants, flocking birds, antelopes, wolves and numerous others, documenting their social characteristics, or as he calls it, examples of their mutual aid. He writes in this whole view of life, “As seen from the above, the war of each against all is not the law of nature. Mutual aid is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle.”
The rest of the chapters, the great majority of Kropotkin's book, deal with homo sapiens and our societal development from hunter and gatherers to agrarian culture and then the beginnings of industrial society. He has two very interesting chapters on the evolution of the medieval town and the guilds which dominated life. He writes, “The guilds were, an attempt at organizing, a close union for mutual aid and support, for consumption and production, and for social life altogether, without imposing upon men the fetters of the State, but giving full liberty of expression to the creative genius of each separate group of individuals in art, crafts, science, commerce, and political organization.”
In Kropotkin's thoughts, the central state of Medieval Europe and then of Czarist Russia, were little more than organizations of oppression and exploitation. Maybe that is always the case of such concentrations of power, characteristics inherent in their very existence. This was at the heart of Kropotkin's anarchist thought, but much to his credit, though he advocates the passing of such centralized power, unlike our present day techno and other assorted libertarians, he understands human society would still very much depend on organization.
Finally, Kropotkin presciently writes, “Mutual aid is met with even amidst the lowest animals, and we must be prepared to learn some day, from the students of microscopical pond-life, facts of unconscious mutual support, even from the life of micro-organisms.” On this, he was proved absolutely correct in the decades after his death. “Cooperation” is inherent in every multicellular organism.
Kropotkin died before genetics became widely understood, once it did, reductionist and determinist evolution, wrongly again, moved evolutionary thinking from the individual to the gene. This view has dominated thinking on evolution for the past half-century and it is a problem, along with others, in Nichola Raihani's, The Social Instinct.
Written over a century after Kropotkin, Raihani's book confirms the basis of Kropotkin's thesis on the intrinsic sociability of life. On Kropotkin's insights on micro-organisms, she writes, “At the molecular level cooperation is ubiquitous: every living thing is composed of genes cooperating with genomes. Move up a rung of the ladder and you find the evolution of organisms, where multiple cells work together to make individuals.” Life at it's most fundamental levels is not simply competition, but also very much cooperation.
However, Raihani's book suffers greatly from present evolutionary reductionism and determinism. Amusingly, she attempts to qualify the presently popular gene-centric view writing, “Of course, genes dont really 'care' about anything – they are just scraps of genetic material incapable of experiencing wants, needs or desires. When we say that genes 'want' or 'care' about something, what we really mean is that genes act as if they care about their survival and if they want to make into the next generation.” That's not a great qualification, especially when the entire book is written is if genes do care and more distressingly, as if they are the fundamental movers of evolution.
What is fascinating and indisputable about genes is they convey the information necessary to build all life. Their replication is indeed how life continues forth generation after generation. Yet the entire diversity of life is due to the fact that genes can be inexact replicators. Mistakes in replication lead to mutations, which then are selected by the larger environment to continue or not. Life's diversity is not owed to the exact replication of the “selfish” gene, but on the contrary to the flawed copy of a now original gene.
Like Kropotkin, Raihani uses examples from bees, ants, birds, meerkats and other animals to show the social aspects of life, but all with an unfortunate genetic fundamentalism. It is when she gets to homo sapiens where her book becomes almost unreadable and where Kropotkin's book is actually much stronger. Kropotkin uses history to show the social components of humanity, Raihani uses physiological testing of human individuals, which despite her advocacy, might better offer greater examples in futility for understanding the processes of evolution.
Most distressingly, she uses the Prisoner's Dilemma. This is the Game Theory, created by the astounding mathematician John von Neumann. It is comprised of two people entangled with each other, limited options available to them, and the resulting choices each make. From a social perspective, call it reductionist determinism as reductio ad absurdum. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean it isn't immensely influential in all sorts of schools of thought, particularly and disturbingly in psychology and the design of information technologies.
What both books prove is there remains much to understand of both the processes of evolution and the interactions of cooperation and competition in all life forms. Where this understanding becomes more important is not just the science, but in the resulting technology. We are fast and deep into technologically manipulating genes without a societal, political, environmental, or even scientific understanding of evolution.
Newtonian physics and reductionism and determinism were powerful tools in creating industrial society. They are insufficient in this new era. Returning to Oppenheimer's excellent talk to the American Psychological Association in 1955, he states, “When physicists enter biology, their first ideas on how things work are indescribably naive and mechanical, they are how things works if the physicist was making them work, not how they work in life.”
Then he warns, “The worst of all possible things would be if psychology were influenced in anyway to model itself after a physics which isn't there anymore.” Yet, this is exactly what reductionist and determinist genetics is doing.
From the beginning, Darwin's theory has been misused to support all sorts of politics. Just as importantly, our established politics influence how we look at a lot of science. In some ways, how we look at something is what we find. Science has always had political aspects, never more than now. As a whole, nature will not care a wisp if we understand or misunderstand how things operate. It will ensure we reap the whirlwind our ignorance and hubris sow.